Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

I grew up in a funny way.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

‚Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don’t understand.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

I wasn’t a kid growing up thinking, ‚One day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech.‘ That wasn’t on my mind.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.